So, normally when I get a really bad show I'm very excited to take it to task and tell you everything that's wrong with it, but this is a bit more melancholy a review, because it turns out that I love BlazBlue as a franchise. The fighting games have been exhilarating to play and rewarding to practice with deep mechanics and colorful, interesting characters, both to play as and to view the story modes of. Speaking of, BlazBlue's story mode goes much, much deeper than any other fighting game I've encountered and is indeed a full Visual Novel within the main game, giving it by far the most engrossing plot of any fighting game you'll ever play, fraught with emotion, sacrifice and tragedy.
What I'm saying is that it's really depressing that so little of what's awesome about BlazBlue made it into this anime.
The writing is functional. It tells the story of Calamity Trigger (the first game) early and then tells Continuum Shift (the second game), which is fine, the plot of Calamity Trigger focuses on an repeating time loop, and so it doesn't need to be dwelt on extensively, where Continuum Shift is more linear and involving all of the characters.
Characters are fine because they were good in the fighting game, and the plot is told in a relatively coherent fashion, though, like any Visual Novel adaptation, quite a bit of detail is lost in the transition from ~20 hours of story in the VN, including multiple routes and multiple ends for 20ish characters to 12 20 minute episodes following something trying to be a linear plot. Nevertheless they manage to hit all the touchstones, though judged on its own merits a number of characters appear so little as to be almost completely extraneous.
The part that ruins the entire thing and shoves it down from a C to a D is the animation. C'mon, guys, this is a fighting game, and a pretty fighting game. This was their opportunity to take things that we only saw in a controlled 2d sprite-based context and make them melt our eyes out of our skulls. And the visuals are NEVER amazing. They barely make "acceptable" half the time, and when you make a series based on a fighting game, your fights have to be awesome, not dry motions with all the impact of a handful of feathers.
The entire series bears the scars of being underfunded: their opening animation isn't finalized until something like episode 6, there is essentially no original music, and while the music from the game is good, that leaves the score somewhat lacking in places. The pacing of the show could have been improved with better animation being able to make fight scenes impressive in less time.
I can't even recommend it as a primer to the BlazBlue universe and story, which is what I was hoping I'd be able to say: "Oh, well if you can get past the shitty animation it's actually a good introduction to a great game series," but it's just not. If you want to get in on a good story, play the games. The anime is not the worst anime I've ever seen, probably not even making my bottom 5, but it has essentially nothing to recommend it to anyone who does not already love BlazBlue, and to them it will be a disappointment.
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